Quality & Accreditation in ECE Teacher Ed

11/16/2005

Quality & Accreditation in ECE Teacher Ed

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.
Maya Angelou

In many communities, child care and Head Start staff are enrolling in early childhood associate degree programs in unprecedented numbers. Like baccalaureate degrees, associate degrees are a cohesive program of coursework that documents and assesses the quality of student learning over time. Good programs can describe the learning outcomes that students will achieve. They align their teaching strategies and their evaluation of student work with these learning outcomes.

NCATE (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education) accredits baccalaureate and graduate teacher education programs. Accredited programs submit evidence that their graduates meet national student performance standards. NCATE works with specialty professional associations to create and assess teacher education standards in each certification area. NAEYC is the specialty professional association for early childhood teacher education.

NAEYC recently launched an associate degree accreditation system. Many early childhood associate degree programs across the country are aligning their coursework with these accreditation standards.

These five core NAEYC standards are shared across the continuum from associate to baccalaureate to graduate early childhood degree programs.

1) Promoting child development and learning

2) Building family and community relationships

3) Observing, documenting, and assessing to support young children and families

4) Developmentally effective teaching and learning strategies

5) Becoming a professional

More detail on the NAEYC teacher education standards and information about the NAEYC Associate Degree Program Accreditation system are available at www.naeyc.org.

Hyson, M. (Ed.). (2003). Preparing Early Childhood Professionals: NAEYC’s Standards for Programs. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Contributed by Alison Lutton

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